Faris stepped through the halls of the university. It had been days, maybe weeks, since he last saw Mei, and he had started to get worried. It was like her to disappear for days at a time, but that didn’t mean he didn’t worry.

It didn’t mean Mei didn’t understand his worry, either. She’d given him permission to check up on her if he hadn’t seen her in a while.

A couple fellow students ran into the hall laughing, but they slowed to a walk when they saw Faris. They nodded as they passed, and Faris nodded back.

Being on the skirmishing sports team had its perks. Granted, he knew that many thought him too unfocused to be good at strategizing the fights, and too short and weak alongside the brawny offensive mages, but no one could deny he had the firmest control of the mounts and the fastest speed on the field.

Despite his easygoing nature leading most to think him unaware of things, he knew what they said about him being friends with Mei, an outcast. But he never thought twice about it. Mei was a superstar researcher. She knew her magic in and out and inversed. All Faris could do was ride stuff.

He arrived at Mei’s study and tapped the button for the study’s bell. The soundproof door meant she wouldn’t hear a knock, and she devised a system to send Faris a message on the door if she was in.

When he received no message on the door, he unlocked it with the key Mei had given him. In all the time they’d set up this system she never actually noticed the bell.

He opened the door and it swung open with a mass of pink tentacles.

“What in the–” He gasped as the tentacles grabbed his arms and shoulders. They pulled him into the room; he pulled back but only managed to hang onto the door, pulling it shut behind him as he was dragged him into a sea of pink, writhing tentacles.

“Mei!” Faris saw Mei’s head poking out a cocoon of tentacles wrapped tight around her. He wondered how this happened but had no time to find out. He had to save Mei, even as the soft tentacles held him down away from her, wrapping around his neck and curling around his head.

He had to save Mei.

He had to save Mei.

He had to . . .

Wait, what was he doing?

Warmth swelled through his head, hot as a summer’s day. Pink bubbles floated and popped around him as the coils bound his arms down and wrapped up his chest. His legs sank beneath the writhing sea.

The room spun as pink rings rippled through his vision. His pupils shrank as they pulsed pink.

He forgot that Mei had been missing for weeks. He was in her study, he was pretty sure, though he was starting to forget what it looked like without a sea of pink tentacles. He could see Mei above the sea in those soft, warm coils, though, a wide grin on her face and pretty pink rings pulsing through her eyes.

She looked like she was enjoying herself immensely. Enjoying herself out of her mind.

She must have invited him to another one of her experiments. Some sort of new entity. It felt nice, warm, quaking through his body. The coils squeezed closer around his head, and a sweet scent filled the air as the bubbles popped endlessly.

He gasped as tentacles slipped under the coils behind him and between his thighs. His mind and body flushed with heat as the tentacles pulled on his nether regions. It was hard to think about anything else, as if they were drawing him into some sort of heat.

The coils lifted him out of the sea, a mass of coils now squeezed tight around his legs, and they pressed him to a bulb standing at the room’s center like a dazzling chandelier. Pink rings pulsed through the bulb, and as Faris stared his mind flooded with hypnotic pink.

It was like—the tentacles squeezed and pulled on him and drained his mind and pushed him into lust—like some sort of enticing, dazzling hypno heat.

Mei had truly outdone herself with this entity. Faris grinned wide as his eyes filled with the intoxicating pink pulsing of the hypnotic bulb. This entity of her’s was truly enchanting.

With another warm pulse through his head, Faris forgot he had even considered the entity Mei’s. She was clearly lost in its hypno heat, far further gone than Faris but in a state the tentacles coaxed his mind towards.

The entity wasn’t Mei’s. Clearly Mei was the entity’s.

And as the plant fed on his mind and fed off his hypno heat, Faris gradually forgot about Mei entirely. Forgot about his sport. Forgot about university. Forgot about himself, as the plant’s hypnotic influence ate away at his mind.

There was only the hypno heat.

For Mei’s part, the remains of her rotting mind sparked up a few thoughts. Something had changed, something not the beautiful, overwhelming sea of plant root coils.

A voice. Something in her wondered if it was familiar, but nothing emerged.

Yet an odd thought that, in her current state, she didn’t understand.

If someone was in the room, they could get caught in hypno heat.

For some reason, something about that seemed bad.

But as a tentacle slid around her head and a warm pulse filled her mind, she forgot about that concern. She locked her door, anyway. Surely no one could enter the room, so no one was in the room.

And she forgot about the lock, and the door, and the room . . .

And on the other side of the room, the door creaked.